June 16, 2010

Gabrielle Line, State Finalist in this years National American Miss Indiana Pageant, helped give back in her community last month by helping at the L & L Hat Drive. Here's the article that was printed in the newspaper with her pictures. Nice work Gabrielle!

L & L Hat Drive

By HFP Reporter on Monday, May 10th, 2010 Bookmark and ShareSubmitted by Danielle Line: The Line and Lambert families have decided to do a hat drive for children with cancer in honor of Saige Lambert who was diagnosed with Leukemia back in September of 2009. (Saige Lambert is the daughter of Greg and Jamie Lambert). Gabrielle and Danielle Line and ShaShawna Titus along with Saige, Sydney and Jamie Lambert came up with the idea of donating hats and headbands to Lutheran Hospital’s Cancer Ward and Riley Children’s Hospital in June. Their hope is to give back to other kids with cancer and put smiles on their faces. The hats will be hand delivered by both families in June.

If you can donate a child's hat or headband with a bow, please contact Danielle Line at 224-2592 or 356-7820. If you are in the Fort Wayne area and would like to drop off a hat or headband to Lutheran Hospital, you can drop it off at the information desk inside the main doors with the attention to Tammy in Pediatrics. The Lamberts and Lines have a goal of 400 hats and 100 headbands with bows on them. They are well on their way to their goal, and with some more help from you, they can do it! Please help put a smile on these kids’ faces!

They are planning to do this every year so if you would like to get your team or organization involved for next year, please contact Danielle Line. What a great community service to teach our children to give back! http://huntingtonfreepress.com/living/communityevents/l-hat-drive-2.html

June 15, 2010

Alexandra Curtis is a familiar face among the NAM families; she should be since she's been with the system for many years and her resume includes numerous runner-up finishes at both the state and national level. In my book, Alexandra represents exactly what NAM is all about. She competes in NAM because she enjoys the experience and the friends she makes; she has an amazing personality, is super talented and isn't afraid to try new things....... like playing goalie on her undefeated LaCrosse team!

She sent me this e-mail along with a few pictures. Thanks Allie, it's so fun to see what you've been up to outside of NAM.

Here are some pictures from my lacrosse season! I played goalie for the Monte Vista Varsity Womens lacrosse team. We went undefeated and won the East Bay Athletic League Championship and then went on to win the North Coast Section Championship. We are the first team in the East Bay Athletic League to go Undefeated and the first team to win back to back North Coast Section Championships. I started playing my freshman year of high school which surprised everyone because not only had I never played before, but no one expected a cheerleader to go out for the lacrosse team. I started playing offense but my junior year i thought it would be fun to try goalie just once during practice and i ended up playing junior and senior year in goal once i found that it was my true passion! When people ask me what I like more- doing pageants or playing goalie I cant ever decide! I say I get the best of both words because i can get on stage in a dress and be girly but I also get to wear full body pads and a helmet and do crazy things to save goals which its the total opposite- yet the two have fundamentally transformed me and built my character and showed me ANYTHING can be achieved!

June 14, 2010

Normally I don't spend a lot of time highlighting the more "typical" pageant activities like riding in parades but I thought the article below was pretty cool! Read on about your new National Princess Queen - she might surprise you!

So how did the Rochester 8-year-old end up as the reigning "queen" in one of the country's most prestigious pre-teen beauty pageants?

It ain't all "Toddlers & Tiaras," folks.

Courtney competes in so-called "natural" pageants, where girls are not allowed to wear the makeup, swimsuits, hair extensions and false teeth depicted on hit reality television shows. In her reign as National American Miss Princess, Courtney has won more than $5,000, traveled to Las Vegas, California and Texas and made public appearances at fairs and parades.

"You go into Wal-Mart and you hear, 'Your daughter is so cute,' " said Courtney's father, Ron Bearer, possibly the world's only motorcycle salvage repairman-cum-pageant coach. "We didn't have any idea what we were getting into."

On her family's patio in rural Beaver County, Courtney commits acts of cuteness with dizzying speed. Have you seen her hula hoop routine? Her back walkover? Her pageant trophy as tall as she is? Her pageant speech heavy on Steelers references? And have you met not just Sweetpea but also her pet alpaca, Stretch?Ever since her first dance recital at age 3, Courtney has been a natural performer, said her mother, Valerie Bearer. "When she gets on stage, she's in the zone," she said.

Four years ago, the family received a flier in the mail for a "National Miss American Coed" state beauty pageant in Harrisburg. Though Mrs. Bearer had never imagined her daughter as a pageant competitor, she let Courtney -- who now fantasized about becoming Miss America -- choose whether she wanted to enter the pageant or go on a planned trip to Disney World.

"We were real iffy on it," Mrs. Bearer said. "We didn't know anything about it at all."They found a Holy Communion dress at JC Penney that they thought might work as a pageant gown and traveled to Harrisburg. For Courtney's age group, pageants involve one-on-one interviews, optional talent competitions, formalwear modeling and short introduction speeches. To her family's surprise, Courtney won the state title -- and a trip to Disney World in Orlando, Fla., to compete in nationals.

The reality of Courtney's pageants, Mr. Bearer said, is nothing like what viewers see on reality TV."It's natural," he said. "It's like Miss America, just shrunk." The Bearer family is both addicted to and horrified by TV shows like "Toddlers & Tiaras" and "Little Miss Perfect," which portray children in full makeup, prancing around in baby bikinis. "I would never do that to my daughter -- never," Mrs. Bearer said.And for Courtney -- whose least favorite part of pageants is sitting still while her mother curls her hair -- so-called "glitz" pageants hold no appeal. "To me it's gross," she said. "Weird. They look like live Barbie dolls."

For the national competition in Orlando, a superstitious Mr. Bearer wore the same "Dad Rocks" T-shirt he wore for the state competition -- just as he eats the same "Steeler pasta" before every football game.Her parents feared that Courtney would be crushed if she didn't win. But when she didn't even place, Courtney was completely unfazed. "Can we go swimming?" she immediately said after the results were announced. It was Florida, after all, in winter.

Though Courtney was eager to compete in another pageant, she had to sit out a year because she had won a state title. So last July, the family again traveled to Harrisburg -- this time for the NAM pageant, formerly known as National American Miss. And Courtney again captured the state title -- along with prizes for modeling and for her hula hoop performance in the talent competition. The family that had barely left Beaver County before Courtney's pageants was off to Anaheim, Calif., for the national NAM pageant.

At pageants, the Bearers have met girls -- even 8-year-olds -- who compete in the events every weekend, employ professional pageant coaches and wear custom-designed gowns. Courtney likes to indulge her inner princess -- just as she likes to raise gnarly-looking caterpillers until they turn into butterflies -- but the Bearers have adopted a decidedly low-key, and low-cost, approach to her pageants.

Take Courtney's dress for the national NAM pageant: Shopping at The Mall at Robinson, her mom spotted a rack of $5 party dresses for a charity sale. They picked five dresses in similar shades of purple and took them to a seamstress, who fashioned a ruffled lavender gown with silver sequins that looked just like it had come from a pageant magazine.

Mrs. Bearer was laid off about two years ago from a job at the Allegheny County Airport, where she'd worked for 16 years. Mr. Bearer works at Cycle Salvage, a motorcycle salvage yard in Rochester owned by his brother. Cycle Salvage is a proud sponsor of Courtney, with ads in Pageantry magazine and her photograph on its website. "He has pictures all over the motorcycle shop -- he is a pageant dad," said Mrs. Bearer, laughing. Mr. Bearer now searches eBay for Courtney's gowns -- she wore an eBay gown for the NAM state title competition -- and has been known to tear up just watching his daughter's videos on YouTube.

Who can say whether it was the patchwork dress, the introduction pronouncing herself as "from the great state of Heinz, Hershey and Steeler mania," or the hula hoops color-coordinated to match her outfit, but Courtney came out of the competition as the national winner. "I didn't even realize I won until they crowned me," she said, demonstrating the straight-armed, wobble-wristed pageant wave that she's now perfected.

She won a $5,000 scholarship, plus jewelry, a digital camera, clothing and luggage -- which she needed to haul home her 4-foot-tall trophy. To commemorate the victory, her father used a computer to create a "City of Champions" picture of Courtney in her sash and tiara in front of the Pittsburgh skyline, with three Stanley Cups and six Lombardi trophies in the background.

Pageants for children have been around since the 1960s, when the "Little Miss America" pageant at New Jersey's Palisades Park Amusement Park would draw thousands of entrants, and have grown in popularity in recent years. "On any given weekend, there are probably hundreds of pageants going on at the same time all over the country," said Valerie Hayes, a Houston, Texas-based pageant coach. "It's a much bigger community than most people realize."

Children's pageants are divided into the no-makeup "natural" pageants and the yes-makeup "glitz" pageants that much of the country learned about after seeing photographs of a dolled-up JonBenet Ramsey, the 6-year-old Colorado beauty queen whose 1996 murder has never been solved. The Miss America and Miss USA organizations don't have pre-teen categories, Mrs. Hayes said. For children looking to advance to those elite pageants when they get older, the NAM pageant is probably the most competitive, she said.

"It's a very, very prestigious title," said Mrs. Hayes, who also hosts the online Pageant Talk Radio show. "It's not uncommon for us to see NAM titleholders pop up a few years later with a local, state or national title in Miss USA or Miss America." More than 12,000 women compete every year in the Miss America competition alone -- though the number of entrants to other pageants has fallen between 30 percent and 50 percent in recent years because of the economic downtown, Mrs. Hayes said.

It is one of Courtney's dreams to be Miss America someday, although she'd also like to be a teacher, a dolphin trainer, a mermaid and the first-ever Steelers cheerleader. In the meantime, she's traveled to Las Vegas for the Miss America pageant and to Texas for a modeling shoot. She's done community-service projects and appeared at events such as the Beaver Memorial Day Parade and the Health Awareness Fair at the Beaver County Jail, sometimes at the invitation of state Sen. Elder Vogel Jr., R-Beaver, who says he's been impressed with her maturity and poise.

"I was in a parade with her and she sat there waving like a little princess," he said, laughing. "She's got that wave thing down pat." Because of her national title, Courtney is barred from competing in another pageant this year, though she will appear at the NAM state pageant in August and the national pageant in November. She's most looking forward to seeing her "sister queens" in older age divisions.

In her daily life, though, many of Courtney's friends from dance or gymnastics classes don't even know about her pageant titles, her mom said. "She's not real girly-girly," Mrs. Bearer said. "You wouldn't tell just to meet her that she's a pageant girl."

June 12, 2010

Check out these two young ladies getting ready to compete in the NAM CA Pageant. Athenna Crosby and Ryann Smith give a great example of how you should stand while on stage at the pageant. When you stand like this, it makes sure you are standing up straight with good posture. Nice work ladies! Looks like you are both ready go on pageant weekend.

Olympia's Kassandra Ward takes a swing at the Aquafina Pitch, Hit and Run sectional competition at the Lacey RAC on Sunday June 6th. Kassandra won the local competition in May to earn a spot in the SW Washington Sectionals, where she took first place with an overall score of 986 including a perfect score in the pitching competition.

Her score was compared against the other 1st place scores in the Northwest Region sectionals and was one of the top three to qualify her to compete at the Seattle Mariners Team Championship being held at Safeco Field on June 20th during the Mariners vs Reds game. The top Team Championship scorers, nationwide, earn a free trip to the Major League Baseball All-Star game in Anaheim to compete in the National Finals competition in July.

June 4, 2010

The NAM program is unique because believe it or not, our focus is NOT about the pageant! Our focus, is on the girls and making sure they have a great experience where they grow, learn valuable life skills and make new friends along the way! Here's a great e-mail I received from one of our California families about their experience at last years California Pageant and the National Pageant. Thanks to the Kucinski's for sending me the e-mail!

Kylie and Candace met on the 1st day of Nationals on the trolley on the way to Disneyland. We hung out with her and her mom that day and then every day after that the entire week of Nationals! Two peas in a pod those two girls and come to find out Candace had a white gown and so did Kylie, Candace had a pink suit and so did Kylie and their outfits for casualwear modeling were almost exactly the same style, just different colors.

After becoming such great friends at Nationals the girls kept in contact afterwards. Because of a tragedy in Candace's family Kylie went to visit her over spring break for support as well as to visit some universities in the area as she was still deciding on a college. Kylie was treated with nothing but southern hospitality which even included a day of 4wheelin' in the mud. They also met gown designer Tony Bowls through Candace's mom's gown shop Magical Moments in Alabama as well as visited the Coca Cola factory in Atlanta.NAMiss girls at Disneyland" width="375" height="500">

Candace plans a trip to N CA for Kylie's farewell pageant in late July...a friendship that will last a life time!Where else would Kylie have met a girl just like herself...but at a NAM Pageant!

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NAM Testimonials

Aug 30 - So National American Miss was successful and soooooo fun. I met so many new people and made so many new friends. Thanks so much to all of my supporters! I love you all and special shout out to @ellabella_182 and @halzcarpenter. See you soon Cali? #fingerscrossed. ~Noelle

Aug 23 - We love being part of the NAM family and our 4 year old daughter will begin competing with her sister next year! The experience and friends made are amazing! Thank you for everything you do for all of the young girls that have been part of the NAM family. ~Sonya

Feb 25 - Thanks for allowing me to participate, I have already given 4 presentations in class without being nervous for the first time ever! Cant wait for next year!! ~ Abby W.

Jan 24 - As a parent, I would say the program is so positive and really builds self confidence and goal setting. ~April S.

Jan 15 - Hello! I have been a part of NAM for three years now, and just went to nationals this year. I love this pageant with my entire heart! ~Stephanie B.

Dec 29 - During 2012, one of my dreams came true. I started my pageant adventure with National American Miss in 2006 But of course, the journey did not stop there! After meeting such amazing girls, I competed in 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011. It wasn't until this year, 2012, that I finally won the title of National American Miss, Miss California. This pageant system played a huge role in the woman I am today, and I am so thankful to everyone I have met and experienced this amazing journey with! Thank you Nam Megan-Brian Cournoyer for absolutely everything, you two are one of the main reasons I came back to NAM all of those years. This 2012... I accomplished one of my dreams, becoming your National American Miss, Miss California. 2012 is a year that I will never forget. ~Alix B.

Dec 27 - I LOVE NAM! ~Margaret T.

Oct 29 - I couldn't be more proud of my niece when her name was called as 2nd runner up in the miss indiana princess division her first year, I see great things in her future ahead. I love you so much Ciara, you are the best niece ever! ~Jeanie L.

Oct 23 - I really love all of the new things that you all are doing this year. It's the little things that make NAM such an amazing pageant system, and I'm so glad I am a California NAM girl. ~Raven D.

Oct 5 - Thank you for the wonderful experience! I had a blast learning knew things and meeting new people. I look forward to joining again this summer, and having some friends join as well. ~Emily S.

Oct 2 - Hi Megan and Brian, just wanna let you guys know even though I haven't competed in two years! I still use everything I learn from you guys in my everyday life! Thank you so much. XOXO ~Bethlehem A.

Sept 24 - I LOVE the photos you posted volunteering. Thank you as I am so proud of you. Love Dad ~Nelson V.

Sept 20 - looking through my album from #NAMnationals 2010 and it makes me so excited for what is ahead!!! can't wait to be with my NAMily and the place where dreams come true ♥ 2 months 1 day and 6 hours, but who's counting ;) ~McKenzie S.

Sept 11 - I could not have chosen a better pageant to kick off my NAM summer tour! I loved meeting all the new amazing girls, catching up with my sister queens, and representing Illinois. I left pageant weekend so happy! Thank you for all the time, effort, and love you put into the enjoyable pageant weekend. ~Isabelle H.

July 12 - What a great experience this weekend was! So grateful to GOD for NAM and our great friends we have made there. NAM Rocks!! ~ Jacqueline H.

NAM: Interview with National Queen, Bishara Dorre

NAM: Interview with Miss California and her Father

Megan's Article in Pageantry Magazine

Pageantry Magazine PodCast with Megan Alexander

Click on the picture above to listen to the entire interview with Megan Alexander who is featured on the cover of the current Fall issue of Pageantry Magazine.

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Is National American Miss a SCAM?

For girls that are new to our program this is one of the most common first questions. Any why shouldn't it be?! It is important to do your homework before signing up for any organization and I'm always thankful when people ask us if NAM is a SCAM.

I like it because we can give such a great answer! Our A+ rating with the BBB and the 30 year history we have of producing quality shows across the country is just the beginning. But don't take it from me, here is an updated list of people posting this question on the web and the answers they receive from other girls: